The Lariat Kid (1929)

Synopsis
by Hans J. Wollstein

One of the more used plots in silent westerns was the one about the son searching for the villain who killed his father. In The Lariat Kid, a thoroughly average oater on all fronts, Hoot Gibson played the son, a lawman just like his murdered father. Ann Christy was the inevitable girl, and the brutish looking C.E. Anderson took the role of the killer, holed up in the notorious bandit's lair of Hell's Gulch. A lot of good western professionals took credit for this already then-stale plot, including former director Jacques Jaccard, who co-wrote the screenplay from an "original" story by Buckleigh Fritz Oxford. Leading lady Ann Christy is best remembered (if remembered at all) as Harold Lloyd's girlfriend in Speedy (1928), the comedian's final silent. Christy was later seriously injured in a car accident, which forced her to retire in the early 1930s.